credits: Mishka Henner, No Man`s LandMishka Henner is an artist and photographer based in Manchester, England, whose work is established in the genres of appropriation art and social documentary. The series No Man’s Land is captured by Google Street View cameras and shows women waiting at the roadside in urban and rural European areas – or maybe they do solicit sex. The question remains unanswered, and the speculation becomes an inherent point of Henner`s work.
Let`s assume that we are looking at prostitutes in the pictures, the series reveals that prostitution is still abandoned to precarious places lacking connections to social life. Due to the fact that space as a resource can empower people, it becomes clear that these women in no man`s land are displaced to illegality.
But the series furthermore […] casts a critical eye on the Street View project itself and on photography’s indelible link to voyeurism and surveillance. The Street View project heralds a new age of street-level cartography that offers a vast, regularly updated archive waiting to be mined by documentarians seeking to make sense of our contemporary condition. Significantly, it combines three key features of our age: the dominance of the car and the road, the availability of the internet and its search engines, and the ubiquity of cameras and surveillance technologies.[…] (press release, London Street Photography Festival).
for German-speaking readers: the Viennese law for prostitution has been passed and a report Nicht vor meiner Haustür by Beate Hausbichler can be found here.